The War Against Section 4
by CSS.Stravag
Summary: UN Squadron SNES game Fic. Chapter 3 UP! Section 4 sends its powerful strategic bomber, Spirit, to finish off Area 88 for good. A deadly battle in the skies over the desert commences, the fate of the unit hanging. Reviews Welcome and used for ideas.
1. The Middle of Nowhere

(Story Title: The Power Of Section 4)

UN Squadron. One of those games of the old Super Nintendo that I bled a good chunk of my life on, trying hard, hard to kill off the final boss as best as possible. And they definitely did not make that an easy feat. Just getting past the battleship _Minks_ was a gold-plated bitch, if you remember. Oi, the amount of times my poor Thunderbolt II was turned into a flaming wreck by those 16-inch guns.

I was always intrigued by the concept of this game, and much to my shock the only person that had tried writing a story on it has summarily disappeared. The way the game was set up lent itself to one helluva interpretable storyline, and the action was definitely fast and frenetic. This was one of the first arcade shooters I played long ago, and it will always hold a special place in my heart.

FYI, I normally play as Greg Gates. Survivability is better than easy advancement or using multiple weapons, makes it easier to actually complete the game by my playing style.

I know that there is a Manga called Area 88 out there, but I have not read it and I am going on pure interpretation with this one, straight from the game. And yes, I will include the aircraft and weapons from the game, though the effects will be a little modified to be more realistic than else. Remember, in this stori I have to turn a 2-D side-scrolling game into a 3-D cohesive work. Don't expect it to be any easier for the pilots, though, who will work as a team at all times. Also, expect that not all the action will take place in the air, as modern warfare is not always decided (or not always even conducted) in the air all the time.

GENERAL DISCLAIMERS: (These apply to all sections and chapters).

I do not own UN Squadron, though if Capcom sells I may have to pinch pennies and nickels to do so. My writing of this story is intended in no fashion to offend nor challenge the copyright that Capcom will hold on this game for a helluva long time. This is free fan art, and I intend no profit off it whatsoever, nor shall I accept any profit from it.

**VIOLENCE WARNING**: Yes, Virginia, this will be violent. Quite violent. You have been warned.

**BAAAAAD LANGUAGE WARNING**: Much as in real life, there will be foul language in some sections. Even the best of us let fly a four-letter word when really pissed off, startled, or else

**ANTI-POLITICAL-CORRECTNESS WARNING**: To strive to be politically correct serves no purpose, for real life makes no such distinction. I will not do so. Death before dishonor. End of story. Please don't ask me to explain this one

And expect a lot of interpretiveness here, as I try to make this a dynamic story that incorporates more than just the fighting. Also expect to see a healthy dose of operations on the side of the enemy, as they attempt to flatten the UN Squadron for fair.

Writing note: I use footnotes for things that I feel need a little modification or explanation. If you see (0) in the story, that means check footnote (0) for some extra intel at the end of the chapter.

And now, on with the show!

* * *

(Prelude: The Middle of Nowhere)

**CRACK CRACK.**

"High, slightly left of center. Pair of eights."

**CRACK CRACK.**

"Slightly left still, but a little better on elevation. Bring it down another ring and you're on."

**CRACK CRACK.**

"That's the ticket, Shin."

**CRACK CRACK.**

"Do it again!"

**CRACK CRACK**

"Looks like you're just a hair behind Azeras. You'll need to keep practicing to beat him, though. He's been improving ever since he got here."

"And against Greg?" Shin asks in response.

"He's an American. He might as well have been born with that Patriot he uses."

"Oh." It was no secret: Americans loved their guns. It followed in series that since they loved their guns, they were usually very good at using them. Shin was Japanese Military; he had trained long and hard on mastering the pistol and rifle, and he was 23. It was often said that what he had taken those five years to learn was the province of 12-year-old boys and girls from the west. Disgusting, really, why would they let little kids train on an adult's combat skills? Was their grossly high murder rate not enough proof of the error of their ways?

"Hey, plane incoming!" Someone shouts from the direction of the hangar; Shin looks to the guy first, then to where he was pointing into the sky. His 20/10 vision immediately picked it out as it came down on the 1-North runway, and he immediately recognized it as a Corsair, an aging but still quite capable fighter. And with the latest weapons additions the Corsair would be an incredible striking platform for basic assaults.

Though, in the long run all three of them would need the latest machines that the governments weren't really willing to part with, if they expected to actually be able to stop the menace that Section 4 was really becoming.

The Corsair landed smoothly and taxied off to the hangars, where the pilot would step out and turn the plane over to the mechanics for maintenance and armament. Shin had ventured in on the hangar in question; he was a bit too young to have flown the Corsair back when it was a common NATO fighter, but even today this one was a well-maintained machine from its general condition and appearance. The tail markings showed it was indeed a Scotland machine, and the pilot looked like northern Europe to Shin.

Area 88. A scratch-up old MiG base in the country formerly known as Turkey. Whoever these Section 4 maggots were had put paid to Turkey, which had involved NATO in heavy ground fighting, which had the rather unseemly side effect of forcing NATO into ground combat with forces that were the better of any of their own; the Abrams, the MLRS units, the Paladin artillery tracks, not to mention everything fielded by Germany and Britain, all a bit outclassed by the foe that had primary use of energy and missile weapons. Some of their units used ballistic weapons, but most of their force used particle-based energy weapons, which worried Shin to no end. There was no real telling how well the aircraft would stand up to the abuse of energy weapons, even with the planned extensive modifications to the airframe and outer skin to make it resistant to energy weapons.

There was no real clue as to who the enemy really was, though; nobody except them knew that, and so far nobody was talking. There had been little chance to take prisoners, and even then the information had not been relayed to Area 88 in a timely fashion, if it existed at all. Azeras was rather skeptical of whether or not the CIA, MI-6, or the KGB were forwarding what they needed to know to take these tangos down, and had made that quite clear to the base commander in the days after Shin and Greg had arrived. Though details were sketchy as to the past exploits of Azeras, Shin had little doubt he had been an intelligence officer as well as professional military; Shin's present leaning was toward Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Iran in duty area that Azeras had served, and being trained by either the Russian KGB or Israeli Mossad. In either case, he was very confident and very ruthless in operations, just the sort of person the UN Squadron needed to get the job done here.

And doing this right would take supreme amounts of balls. Because the UN Squadron would be the rapier that knifes out the heart of the enemy before the ground forces come in and sledgehammer the remnant.

Operationally, they did not have to kill them all. What the fighters missed, the ground forces would mop up. The catch was, the minimum to be taken down had to be at least forty percent, or the ground forces would be unable to unseat the foes, and that forty percent had to include the enemy experimental units, which intelligence believed was the whole purpose of Section 4. A research and development group for someone else.

Well, the UN Squadron, despite being mercenaries themselves, had their own research groups and advanced arsenals to drop on the enemy. As well as some mainstay weapons like bombs, Air-to-ground cruise missiles, napalm, and vulcan guns.

In Shin's estimate, this would get real bloody before it even began to get better.

-x-x-x-

(Location Ref: Section 4 Primary Base, Grid ref 15 by 5)

"The last of the enemy advanced fighters has arrived at base, grid ref 5 by 2. Confirmed F8E Corsair, modified to carry a heavy and experimental weapons load."

"So, that puts a Corsair, a Tomcat, and a F-20 at that base, with experimental weapons from each of the countries in question." They only knew the model number of the Japanese fighter, they did not have a proper name for it...yet.

"Correct, General Barkas," the Colonel in charge of intelligence affairs notes.

"Very well. Operations, I want a status report on our forces assigned to smash this base," the General orders. "While you're at it, a report on our other forces would be good as well."

"First off, Firebase Alpha is at sixty percent, and the Regulator is in place. We have scouting forces equal to four regiments standard ground forces, pushing hard forward to break through the enemy ground forces and get solid coordinates on the enemy base. Once we have that, all we need to do is feed Regulator missiles and watch the fireworks. Spirit is presently flying over the Med with the air group, working on sinking the _John F. Kennedy_, America's heaviest naval asset in the area. Blackbird is out over the Poland area, firing cruise missiles into Germany to stymie their attempts to reinforce the battle front, you'll need to ask Intel about success for that operation. The three Nighthawks and the rest of Wolfpack merc group are back at base for routine maintenance and can be launched at any time. Our land-carrier _Sorvetz_ is still coming in from the north, ETA 4 days. _Minks_ is still trying to break through Suez, moderate resistance from United States naval assets, though they don't foresee any major challenges getting up here unless _John F. Kennedy_ or _Nimitz_ decides to try and stop it. And _Gungnir_, here at base, is still undergoing final modifications and construction. It will not be combat ready for another month, at the least."

"The enemy does not intend on giving us a month, Colonel. We need _Gungnir_ ready to go right the hell now."

"Sir, we have everyone available right now working on _Gungnir_. If we added any more personnel, it would have to come from the base defenders or the base construction teams, unless you can call for another few regiments of personnel from the homeland?"

"Pah," The General retorts acidly; "those pansies in the home office think we are overstaffed and underachieving, as if any one of us could wave our dick around and use it to smash the enemy divisions coming down from Germany. I keep shouting for more conventional ground forces to shore up our flanks, but they are refusing on grounds. They have not explained what grounds they are withholding forces on, of course." That was an old tale to Section 4, of course. Like their counterparts here (in Turkey) and elsewhere, they were a research unit that was understaffed, underpaid, under-sexed, and way the hell overworked. "We need to find a way to get _Gungnir_ working without compromising our other projects. Ideas?"

"You could always go to the top, request the regiments from the Archon himself," the Brigadier of the Forest Fortress notes.

"Prostrate myself before that bohemian dumbass? Like hell that would work," General Barkas replies stiffly.

The room became eerily quiet for a minute.

"Nothing? No ideas?" The General asked fairly.

"No, sir, not one. All our projects are running understaffed, just as is _Gungnir_."

"Damn, looks like I'm going to have to ask a few of the other generals for personnel, see if someone can spare a few battalions," he muses. "All right, anything else to report?"

"No sir," more than a few of them reply.

"Chad, please remain." It was a clear dismissal to the remainder of them, who to a man filed out and were gone. Only Colonel Chazz 'Chad' Mary was left with the General. Some also called him 'Hail' Mary for his apparent ability to hand the other foes of the Home Office a defeat on a shoestring force composition, which was not a simple task given the other foes they had accumulated elsewhere. Barkas had pulled Chazz from a posting in a real quagmire—a battle of attrition against foes far worse than NATO—to help him get these projects finalized so they could be used to take this world and reinforce the forces elsewhere.

"What'll it be, boss?"

"This annoyance...this Area 88, what do they look like to you?"

"The last desperate harangue of a dying people, boss," Chazz replies almost immediately.

"If you would, explain that."

"The UN is in the shitter on this planet. After America told them to go suck wind, and kept to their NATO buddies instead of the blowup in Africa in years past, they went downhill. The great backwards-attempt at socialism has failed for this planet; more's the pity, I think our job would be easier if the UN had swept away all that NATO bullshit instead of vice-versa. You'll note that they are using the UN Squadron as the initial thrust, but their battle plan calls for NATO to do all the real heavy lifting?"

"I noticed. You're saying that the UN has little actual strength here?"

"Correct. They must be desperate, like grade-A, balls-to-the-walls desperate for anything resembling a victory here. Unchecked, though, NATO would be able to crush us in place unless we get our prototypes up and running."

"_Gungnir_ should be able to erase their divisions off the map, all we have to do is get it mobile and active."

"Once we get the Phase Pulse Cannon running on _Gungnir_, you can kiss any amount of land on this planet goodbye, but we have to get it running first," most effort of which had failed to one degree or another, though._Nobody said making superweapons would be easy, of course_, Chazz thought wryly behind a passive mien. The policy of Home that required such means, however distasteful it may have been to him as a person, was still the policy of his governing entity and he would do it as ordered, when ordered. Calling him a super-patriot would not have been unfair or inaccurate. He considered his duty to Home to be the greater of any other consideration he may have had, including his life. Few any more believed that old premise, and even less were willing to enact it since death was becoming the all-too-frequent outcome of the battles they fought. For sure their foes elsewhere were not relenting; if anything, the enemies of the Home Office were becoming more and more fanatical about taking them down.

-x-x-x-

Shilke, a scout for the Section 4 team, had been assigned forward of the Firebase for the purpose of finding the exact location of this Area 88. The base itself occupied three grids in theory, though those three grid references were a hundred kilometers square each, and trying to take that much land off the map using the Regulator would take way the hell too many missiles. Thus, his team was supposed to get hard coordinated and oh, by the way, don't get caught by their base security forces.

"Rigo, Consuela, move up to that dune on the left and check out the area. But be damn careful about it, kids," Sergeant Coras says. Their squad sergeant was the grizzled one of the team, having seen combat in six theaters in his lifetime against the enemies of the Home Office, and somehow he had managed to survive the onslaught of the 'righteous'. Of late, surviving was not the expected outcome; the enemy they faced elsewhere had such overwhelming technological advantages that any numerical superiority the Home Office may have had in a combat theater was simply target practice to the arrogant assholes they fought. Thus the whole existence of Section 4, that the weapons built here could be used elsewhere to help win through against the hated foes, and oh, by the way, having this lovely world under their control would be nice as well.

"Roger that, boss," Consuela replies and begins a cautious, hunched-over dash for that dune. Shilke had to admit that the Hated Enemy had one thing right intrinsically: women could fight just as well, often better than a male counterpart. They had managed to force that much upon the Home Office, as in some theaters the national population had been literally depopulated of all males above the age of twelve in combat against the Hated Enemy, and they still lost that theater even with combat-capable women available that could not fight because they were not allowed. A necessary change, and one that Shilke did not object to; Consuela and he got along very well.

Shilke carefully watched them move through the shadows of the dunes to where they were at the requested location, then signal back visually for the rest of the team to move up. After a few moments, they all had assembled and moved to the next dune. They could hear activity to the southwest, but they could not see anything yet. Hearing the base, though, meant they were real close.

"All right, Shilke, Greg, your turn."

"Where to, boss?" Greg asks. His was the heaviest load of the team, but he was also built monster-style for it as well. His armaments consisted of a pistol, 9 millimeter, a sub-machine gun, 9 millimeter, and a recoilless rifle, 150 millimeter, with four extra rockets for use on heavier targets. Everyone else carried the G3A3, except for Rigo, who carried the MG3 Light Machine Gun, a monster that hocked over 1200 rounds a minute of 30-caliber ammunition.

"Head forward and slightly left to that hillock over there."

"Roger that," Shilke replies as he begins cautiously moving up toward the ordered dune. Greg was not far behind, though when they got to the hill in question some nagging part of his soul made Shilke stop before he looked over the rim toward whatever may be beyond. Also, he did not signal for the remainder of the team to approach, which was confusing their sergeant until they heard something.

The sound was low at first, a low rumbling and high-pitch whistle combined, ramping up until such a point that the rumbling was incredibly loud and so was the whistling. "Jet engines," Greg says after a moment. "If I don't miss my guess, sounds like a F-14."

"How do you know that?" Shilke asks.

"I used to live near a factory that produced F-14s for the war back home," Greg replies stoically. Rather than looking over the top of the hill, he looked around the right side, then came back to a hidden position. "Yep, F-14 in United States paint-job. And the hangars are all down the side of the taxiways. We found it."

"Distance from here to the centroid of the base?" Shilke asks. That was what the base commander wanted, where the center of the base was.

"That way about two kilometers," Greg points. "Heavy concentration of buildings, crew quarters and something else that I didn't quite recognize," he says as the Sergeant approaches.

"Excellent work, team, time to hump it out of here—" the F-14 that they had been listening to had been in takeoff cycle, and finally came up off the runway headed almost directly right over them. When he got to a certain airspeed and altitude he turned around as if he was going to land again; this had the Sergeant confused, unless the pilot had some kind of mechanical problem?

"Everyone down and stay down," Coras orders. He could only hope the enemy did not have low-light IR or NV equipment to see his team at night. "Consuela, get on the horn and relay what we found, quick," he finishes.

Consuela had some objections to using a radio this close to a major enemy base, but she bit her lip on that account and did as ordered. The word went out: base center in grid 9-by-1, sub-grid 86-by-47. The order came back to withdraw the team immediately and hunker down to watch the fireworks.

"Sir, we got a problem, that fighter's coming back around," Shilke notes worriedly as he watches the fighter perform a classic hammerhead turn that literally reversed its direction, just before the pilot put some speed on.

"Oh, shit, he's seen us," Coras notes. "Run for it!" he shouts as he suits actions to words. The rest of the team was not far behind him, either.

**WRAAM**. Whatever hit the ground where Coras had been, had left damn near nothing left of him beside one booth that fell to the ground in front of Consuela, who appeared stunned but still alive. Rigo had been wide and slightly forward, so he was blown away from the impact location though relatively intact. Shilke could not see the rest of their eight-man squad, they had been close to Coras and may have been annihilated by whatever hit the Sergeant.

_What was that_? He asks blearily in the confines of his mind. It was not a typical weapon, that was for sure. It almost looked pink, except for a malevolent red pattern of some kind in it (1). His reverie of what had hit the team did not last long before he was out cold from impact trauma. He never even had the chance to shoot himself, as he wanted to do instead of being captured by local barbarians...

* * *

Author's Chapter Afterword:

Prelude to reckoning, anyone?

This is just the beginning, as is said, the prelude to the first battle. The first mission is next chapter, as the team has to put paid to the Regulator MLRS before it puts paid to the base. Nobody said it would be easy, and this is where the experimental equipment will come in handy for the team, since they have a lot of enemies and static defenses to shoot through before they can even begin in on the Regulator.

Don't fry a brain cell trying to sort out Section 4's angst right now. If I write a sequel to this story, it'll all become a lot clearer as to what that references.

If you have any questions, comments, just want to say this is cool or sucks, drop me a word in a review. I listen to all comments and I am not a flamer when people criticize me. If you have suggestions, I will listen to those as well. I always like suggestions.

As is said elsewhere: Keep the reviews coming, comrades, your dreams are but a drop of fuel for the ongoing nightmares of Area 88.

* * *

Footnotes:

(1): this was one of the F-14's in-game special weapons, the Super Shell. It is a high-damage penetrator weapon, but by extrapolation when used against the ground it would have a kinetic component to it as well, which would throw the scout squad's survivors around. Expect to see more of this weapon as the story progresses.


	2. Bombs and Rockets, Oh My!

(Chapter 2: Bombs And Rockets, Oh My)

"I would say good morning, but obviously it is not," Azeras notes rather coldly. Evidence of why came in a moment thereafter:

**CRACK-FOOM**.

"It goes without saying that recon team that Greg mulched on a check ride of his Tomcat got the info off, and that damned MLRS unit they've been building was the reason they were looking so hard. Well, they got what they asked for, and so have we. Pay or play time, pilots, we take the enemy MLRS out or it bombs us into oblivion. I don't think it is a hard choice."

**Crack-FOOM**. That time the rocket hit farther away from the command bunker, though Shin had little doubt that for every rocket that hit, it would cause serious damage.

"Your objective is to airstrike the enemy base here," and Azeras indicates the location of the enemy frontline base, "To clear out the major enemy air and anti-air resistance, and then bomb, strafe, rocket, and otherwise assault the enemy MLRS unit. Take it down, hard."

**CRACK-FOOM**. That time, the rocket landed close enough to the secured bunker that the lights shook visibly and severely.

And still, Azeras looked mildly annoyed, not really scared. Shin had little doubt that he looked passive, though inside he was not relishing having to launch in the middle of a rocket barrage. "You will get airborne immediately at angels nineteen to avoid the actual flight path of the rockets, and come down on the northern edge of the base." Angels Nineteen was an old expression of the Air Force, where each Angel of altitude was a thousand feet. "In doing so, you should be able to skip most of the triple-A the enemy has laid out for you. Keep in mind that we really do not want the whole base trashed, but when you get down to it, better their base than ours."

"NATO assistance?" Mickey McScymon asks. He was the pilot of the Corsair, new to the base, but definitely not new to flying.

"Ground only, in four hours. If we wait that long, this base may not exist."

**CRACK-FOOM**.

"Cleaning this up is going to be a nightmare," Greg notes.

"We have to be alive in the end to clean this up. Keep that in mind." If Azeras could be or sound any colder, how was lost on the three pilots. "Take this base and make it our sword for thwarting Project Four. Dismissed."

The three pilots stood up and came to attention, then saluted in the fashion native to their countries. Azeras returned the gesture as was proper, though Shin made it a note to review some footage of eastern-bloc military forces to see if he could closer peg the origin of their intelligence officer. Not that Shin distrusted Azeras at any level, but not knowing annoyed Shin more than anything else.

**CRACK-FOOM**.

-x-x-x-

"Roger that, thanks," Chad hung up the field phone. "Well, General, the Regulator is in salvo three right now, of ten planned salvos. We have NATO ground forces trying to press forward in theory to stop it, but we have the four regiments assigned to the base hunkered down in defensive position. Provided their aircraft do not slip through our forward air defenses, the Regulator should spend most of today completely untouched."

"Chance of that?" General Barkas asks level.

"If the pilots are as good as the enemy hopes they are, better than 60/40. Still, if they get close enough, the Regulator rearms with SAM missiles designed for it, and it has separate tactical missile launchers forward and back to help shoot down any annoying flies in the area." It went without saying that ground forces were hamburger compared to the massive Regulator, which could and would run over a M1 Abrams or Challenger MBT and destroy it. The Regulator itself weighed 10,000 tons, fully loaded 10,855 tons. In theory it was also supposed to be able to run over and destroy the armor forces of the enemies elsewhere, but its most deadly feature was not the massive treads, it was the missile launcher it carried.

"And what are the contingencies for losing the Regulator?"

Chad actually had to reference his documentation for that. "Well, sir, if we lose the Regulator, or quartermasters can pull remaining personnel and equipment out of the base back to Midgar, or they can swing north and join the carrier group that is just now settling into position." Midgar was the name of the forest fortress, the gatekeeper to the mining projects that were providing necessary resources for the rest of the operation. "Absolute worst case, we haul them southeast to be extracted by Seavet."

"I hate to think that the enemy would be able to actually chance damaging the Regulator, but in this case better we be prepared than left standing in a precarious position," General Barkas notes with a raised eyebrow.

_Prudent_, 'Chazz' thinks wryly. "Should I move Seavet up to a covering position?"

"No, best we hold her out in deeper water for now. Recall Spirit to base and have her rearm and refuel for a bombing campaign, that way if the Regulator goes down we have options."

"Roger that, sir," Chazz (Hail) Mary replies.

"God, we are starting to sound like the cynics of the Home Office. Where did we go wrong?"

"We fight the strange battles. Strange battles make for strange requirements, which makes for a hardened attitude. And there is nothing the Home Office does that is not strange, boss." Chazz made it sound like he was stating a natural law.

"Therefore, we are doomed to be cynics?" the Boss asks.

"Something to that effect," Chazz replies. "Look, I'll agree that the enemies we've accrued are hella nasty, thus the requirements of this project. Sometimes I wonder what our Commanders are thinking, follow?"

"You aren't the only one wondering what maniacs we are serving under, but you never heard me say that. Still and all, when they say jump, we do so and we hope it is high enough. You know the drill as well as I do, Chazz, maybe better."

"I've been there a few times, General," Chazz replies judiciously, not yet willing to put his own experience in a position where it could be considered more than his CO's field experience. The politics up at this level of command could be very messy and slippery, and the fall from this rung of the ladder was a helluva long drop.

"All right, see to it. With luck, in a matter of days this old MiG base known as Area 88 will be a smoking crater and we can begin production on the next Regulator."

"Indeed. By your leave?" Chazz says as he stands to attention.

"Dismissed, thank you," General Barkas replies.

-x-x-x-

Azeras could not help but grimace. Things were not going well for NATO on the ground, and unless he could take an untested mercenary air force element—not even a full wing of planes, just three of them—and smash some of the ground resistance, NATO's first thrust into enemy-held territory would be stopped butt-cold at the first enemy defense line.

"Why, oh why do these things happen to otherwise nice people?" One of his Operators asks nobody in particular.

"Because, my lady, there is always someone out there that is not nice," Azeras replies offhand.

The Operator was not strictly referring to the Area 88 personnel, as being mercenaries they were not required to be nice. They were referring to the civilians of Turkey, who were caught in the middle of this mess. And still they did not know enough about this Section 4, except that they were using some really advanced weapons.

"Am I reading this right?" the NATO Commander says, looking over the same tactical map as Azeras.

"You are," Azeras replies coldly. "If they hit the 4th Panzergrenadiers any harder, they'll punch right through into our rear lines."

"Great. I don't have any reserves available to shore that area up," he notes sourly.

"Are not Americans the great nation of the believers, where there is a will there is a way and all that happy faith?" Azeras asks.

"Sort of," the General in charge of the NATO forces replies. He was an American, a big black guy at that, and had a reputation for being one of the best NATO combined force commanders out there. "If you ignore all those people that want nothing more than money."

"As strange as this sounds from an East Bloc soldier, show a little faith in the air forces, comrade." Azeras adroitly avoided accreditation of which country he came from, of course.

"I am, but the map is not looking any better now than it was a day ago. In fact, it looks a bit worse."

"How long until you can get reinforcements from the mainland?" Azerask asks, more or less referring to the rest of Europe.

"France is waffling on how much they are willing to commit. Germany has a lot of their defense forces on rails already, headed this way. Same with Britain and the other member states. Supposedly the United States is airlifting whatever they can muster over here, but that is probably going to be a case of too little too fast, and not enough of the heavy forces we really need."

"Ah," not so much a sound of recognition as one of dread. Azeras was hoping the Americans could pull off one of their typical, timely miracles to get a large amount of forces in place to beat back the enemy and their amazingly powerful ground forces. Apparently not today, or this week for that matter.

"Looks like you're it," the General says gruffly.

"Commander, our planes are readying to launch right now," one of the Operators says.

"Do we have a working airfield for them?" By which he meant a runway without holes in it.

"Roger that, we have runway 8-left and the associated taxiways," the flight controller says. "The tower is evacuated, so I'm doing takeoff clearance right now." It went without saying that you did not leave the tower staffed with missiles coming in, since the tower was very likely targeted by the missiles as well.

"Get them moving, right now," Azeras orders.

"God protect them, 'cause we can't support them on the way in or out," the General says.

"Tigershark is launching right now," one of the Operators notes. "Tomcat to Runway 8-left," she orders on the radio.

"Tomcat, Flight Control, you are cleared for immediate takeoff runway 8-left. Don't hang around, Gates, get her up to Angels 19 and standby for vector," the Flight Boss orders.

"Roger that," Greg replies immediately. The sound of his engines could be heard for a few moments before:

**CRACK-FOOM**.

"Shit, more missiles incoming, get the Corsair up and moving now!" Azeras shouts almost angrily.

"Corsair, you are cleared immediate takeoff on runway 8-left! Move your ass pilot!" This was rather angry from the Flight Boss.

**CRACK-FOOM**.

"Corsair is ramping up right now," one of the Operators notes, followed by:

"Oh, shit, there's a missile headed right for that runway," one of the radar operators says.

**CRACK-FOOM**. **WRAAAM**.

"The munitions bunker, I take it," Azeras notes sourly. The secondary explosion had been enough to rock the whole base and put some of the less steady command bunker personnel on their arses, it was that powerful.

"That missile may have changed course," the senior radar operator says. "And it still don't look good."

-x-x-x-

" 'Bad day' my ass," Mickey notes as he starts down the runway. "This isn't bad, it's a damned nightmare," he says as he advances the throttle all the way to the stops.

**CRACK-FOOM**. **WRAAAM.**

"Jesus, that looked like it blew something important up," Mickey says as his craft jolts from the passing pressure wave of the sympathetic detonation. "Greg, Shin, how does it look up there?"

"Clear skies at 19, just as Azeras figured. The rockets appear to be topping out at 15 and arching back down on our base," Greg notes.

"No enemy air presence," Shin notes after a moment.

"Rotating now," Mickey says. It was only then that he saw the engine halo of the missile headed basically for the runway he was on. "Oh, sweet Jesus," he notes as he hauls back on his flight stick.

**CRACK-FOOM**.

"Mickey, you all right?" Greg asks after he sees the explosion real close to the Corsair.

"Yeah, I'm all right. I think. That was close, though, very close," he says as he pulls the landing gear up and begins a decent ascent. "Nothing is broke on my plane so far," he says as he checks over all of his indicators and flight panels. "Arsenal is intact, I should be good to go."

"Excellent. We will need all the firepower we can muster and more," Shin notes.

"UN Squadron, this is flight control. Your vector is 1-1-0 at Angels 19 for 400 kilometers, then proceed to descend to Angels 2 for your attack run. Your target should be a very large tracked ground vehicle with a missile box on the frame. Be advised that we believe it has SAM capability and heavy armor, over,"

"Flight Control, Shin, roger your instructions and advisement, over,"

"Good luck, Squadron. Flight Control is over and out," she says before the transmission cuts out.

" 'Nightmare' is the nice way to put this," Greg says. "I've been on some hairy real-estate before, but I've never actually been on an airbase under a missile attack. This is one I'm not going to forget." From their altitude, they could see the rather large explosions every twenty to thirty seconds as missile after missile struck the base. The pattern seemed to be random, though so far a missile had not struck the same location twice yet. That made Shin wonder if the enemy was planning on just blanketing the whole base or if they were spamming random potshots at it.

"It can be worse," Shin says at his most cynical. He thoroughly expected it to get worse before the war was over.

"Don't tell me how," Mickey replies. "I've had enough of a bad day as is, I don't need any more motivation."

"Motivation? For what?" Greg asks.

"You don't want to know," Mickey replies deadpan.

"Oh," Greg replies.

"Search radars active, people," Shin says, nothing that his comrades did not have their radars on.

"Right," Greg replies, realizing he did not have his radar on yet. "Radar active, no threats."

"Nothing on my scope, either," Mickey replies.

"How are we going to do this? Blitz through, hope we survive long enough to render that weapon inop?" Mickey asks.

"We attack from slightly east of north, most of their anti-air is concentrated to the west. Once we are in, our first priority is the weapon. Then we do what we can to shoot up their ground forces. We have to take that missile system down, though, or we have problems."

"Roger that," Mickey says. 'Problems' was about as obvious as a coal pile in one of the hangars: no base to come back to means they would be crash-landing their craft somewhere as far away from the enemy as possible, and that also skanked most the operational hope for the formation and the whole of NATO. On the other hand, kicking the enemy out of their frontline base would have the reverse effect: it would take quite a bit of the starch out of the enemy forces and eliminate the immediate threat to the base.

- - - - -

As Shin expected, the enemy was not caught unawares.

"Shake it loose, team, they know we're here," he says as he lowers his altitude a couple dozen meters to throw off their aimpoints.

"Roger that," Greg replies. Of all the craft in the mission, his had both the most powerful and least useful weapons for the break-in phase. The Super Shell and Thunder Laser weapons he carried would be marvelous for the enemy missile tank, but against the initial thrust all he really had to use was his 20mm Vulcan gun. Not that such would be a bad choice, using AP shells he could in theory knock out their thin-skinned AA units and the like, but for the heavier ground targets Shin or Mickey would have to do the job.

"Going right, looks like there is less Ack (1) and guns to the right than else," Mickey says.

"Greg, follow me in, don't be afraid to use your Vulcan on the Triple-A Guns," Shin says. Shin activated his advanced electronics in the aging Tigershark for bombing, and selected the 500-lb bombs that he had been issued for the attack. Of these he had ten bombs, as well as some other missiles for the actual assault against the heavy-armor missile tank.

"This is Mickey. I'm goin' in low, see if I can't punch a hole in their forces with this new toy of mine," he says.

"Watch it, Mickey, you're headed right for a gun emplacement," Greg notes as he dips down to fire a burst of Vulcan at a free-standing gun emplacement.

The guns themselves fired in a weird pattern. They fired single shots, slow-moving projectiles that glowed luminescent. In the morning sun it was hard to track the glowing balls as they came up at the planes, Though they were slow enough that if they were seen even close, there was usually enough time to dodge around them. Greg took one hit to his fuselage, and apparently whatever it was had quite a bit of damage potential.

"I just hope this doesn't blow my own damn plane up," he says before he triggers the Cluster pack after dodging left to avoid three of the glowing balls.

The Cluster pack was actually a weapon integrated into the airframe of his craft in a series of nacelles the upper and lower wing surfaces. As he triggered off Cluster 1, the outermost four of the twelve weapon strips ejected from the airframe. Approximately one second after ejecting, all four of the strips explosively separated into two dozen high-explosive submunitions, each the relative size of a grapefruit. They scattered in an area-denial pattern that basically created a ring of explosions around his craft both above and below it, at a range that would not throw fragments into his craft but would play hell with anything in the area of the detonations. These explosions managed to shred apart over a half-dozen of the enemy anti-air guns and damage an equal number.

"Holy, it worked!" Mickey says. "Looks like I owe that old bastard in the hangar five bucks."

"It works," Shin replies as the Tigershark dove down to apply a few dozen rounds of twenty-millimeter cannon to a gun. When he came up again he dodged around paired bursts of honest-to-fate AAA from a larger gun emplacement. "That is not a small weapon platform. Mickey, can you swing by and drop a bomb on that one?"

"Can do, stand by," Mickey dodged left around one group of enemy shots, right around another, and then left and on target to drop one of his 500-pound bombs. Despite it being a rather small bomb, the 500 pounds of explosive did manage to turn the gun emplacement into a twisted pile of scrap metal and spectacularly exploding ballistic ammo.

"Uh, guys, we got helos taking off from the far end of the field," Greg notes as he dodges around a burst and noses down long enough to apply a burst of gun to a tank with the same energy cannon technology as the AA guns. The shells apparently did some damage to it, because it stopped rotating or attempting to shoot at the squad members.

"Roger that," Shin says as he picks up his visual and radar scanning. "Going Phoenix," he says; this was likely his greatest gamble of the day, as the Phoenix was a missile initially introduced for the Tomcat, not for the Tigershark. In the distance they could just barely make the target out (or what appeared to be either the target or a large-ass building), and that behind a screen of ascending helicopters that looked like old HIND helicopters or derivatives. "Fox-two!" he shouts as he pulls the trigger.

A pair of the missiles, of which he had eight total, rippled off the rails and immediately started homing in on the target. Each missile was heavy, like almost a ton each heavy, but thankfully his country had pulled out all the stops for his fighter and shoehorned a far more powerful engine into a modified airframe. He could carry a truly awesome combination of anti-air and anti-ground payload, and even had the capabilty of carrying slightly more than he was loaded with right now. He just wished that his nation had issued out one of the YF-23 prototypes that they were working on...

The missiles flew straight and hammered into a pair of the helicopters. "Slow-ass whirlies. Hit them and blitz straight through, they won't be able to chase us...huh?" Mickey sounded dumbfounded about something...

"What's up?" Greg asks as he fires a pair of bursts of cannon, each burst into a separate helicopter. One helicopter lost its rotor courtesy of one of the shells, the other took the hits through the windshield and killed the flight crew; the latter helicopter spun out of control and slammed into a third, both craft dying in a spectacular explosion of fuel tanks and ordinance.

"It looks like...shit, SAM! SAMs incoming, big suckers!" Mickey shouts as he takes his craft down to the deck amid a hail of fire from the helicopters, again matching the tanks and AA emplacements thus far encountered: a glowing ball of something coming his way. As he descended his craft walked through a burst of the glowing balls, but that far better than being rammed by a flying chimney-stack like what was heading his way.

"Get low, get fast!" Greg shouts as his F-14 sinks down to NOE (2) flying. Shin and Mickey followed suit, the latter after regaining proper control of his craft from the hit he took.

It worked. The SAMs were not designed to track on a target that had buried itself in ground clutter returns, and the SAMs tracked in on a factory for the base, a pair of AA guns, and a helicopter that was just taking off in the vicinity of the aircraft. Each was hit with precision and sundered by the amazingly large missiles that carried basic 3000-pound radial charge warheads that were more effective against an armored target or a bunch of fighters than a single aircraft.

"SAM-D stovepipe is what that thing looked like, right?" Shin asks directed toward Greg, who used to be United States Air Force.

"It looked real similar, but it was a helluva lot hotter in flight than the old SAM-D or Talos chimney-stacks. Patriot would go through those things like a chainsaw," Greg notes, referring to the Patriot AA/AMS missiles that saw their first major use in the Gulf War, blowing the hell out of SCUD ballistic missiles. "That was something similar, but way different all the same, I think Patriot would have had a problem with that," he adds.

"Screw it, they don't have any defenses between us and their...building on treads?" Mickey asks, for the first time seeing the totality of what they were gunning for.

"MLRS on crack _and_ steroids," Shin replies, which was the first thing approaching humorous that Mickey and Greg could recall ever hearing from him (3). The whole machine was moving backwards down what looked like a concrete aquifer trench but at a less-than-optimal pace to avoid being overtaken by the fighters, which had gravitated up slightly to get a better look at it.

"Hit it," Mickey says as he lays into it with bursts of his Vulcans. As far as he could tell, the cannon shells were doing no notable damage to his target, however, which was less than encouraging to the pilot. Before he completely overshot the target he switched to bombs and rippled off four, which should have caused some damage to it...

Shin had completely foregone the cannons thus far, instead programming the bomb drop computer to release all of his remaining bombs inside of 100 milliseconds, which hopefully would put all of them on or around the target. He never got the chance to drop them, however. The enemy displayed an even more frightening capability against their smaller craft; "Crap, more SAMs, and these are a lot smaller than those stovepipes from before!"

"I see it," Greg says as crossed below Shin's flight path and ejected a group of flares and chaff to disrupt the missile. The missile was fairly dumb in terms of targeting profile, and seeing the larger chaff outside its radar cone, hoped in on it and blew in front of the radar decoy. "Got that sucker!"

"Guys, he's got one on the back of his tank, too!" Mickey says as he drives his aircraft down to NOE to avoid another radar-homing missile. This one flies into the side of the culvert they were traveling down, but only after passing within 200 meters of Mickey's F8E.

"Can we shoot those missile launchers out?" Shin asks.

"I can try," Greg notes as he toggles to his Super Shell weapon. "Shin, Mickey, you two go in and distract him for about three seconds while I line up on him," Greg requests as he brings his craft around in a roll to get back on target real fast.

"Way ahead of ya," Mickey says as he pops up and ripples another three bombs off, these headed at the back of the enemy tank. One fell short by ten meters, one struck halfway up the back armor, the third hit the rear of the missile box.

"Roger that," Shin says as he deliberately hoses down the area of the smaller SAM launcher with 20mm. It did not appear to have any effect on them, though when the next SAM launched he managed to persuade it to follow a set of flares into the ground, not one of the aircraft.

"Fox One!" Greg shouts as he pulls the trigger with the reflector sight over the target where he wanted it to hit. The two Super Shells blasted out of the weapon canister and streaked straight to the aimed point on the enemy unit. Greg had the satisfaction of seeing part of the enemy machine erupt in a hellish fireball, though as he flew over it he could see the enemy was still operating.

The enemy tank disappears in a cloud of rocket exhaust, apparently still not crippled of combat capability. Another four stovepipes were now headed at the squadron, which given that they were flying away meant that these missiles where chasing their tails, not charging them down head-on. "Crap, another batch of them?" Mickey asks.

"Great, fox-two on the helos," Shin says, his mind working furiously between four tasks and two objectives. The two Phoenix missiles drilled in on the enemy helicopters and sent a pair of them to the ground in smoldering crumples.

"Blitz back through the helos, maybe their missiles will track in on their own again!" Greg says as he suits actions to words, using his 20mm Vulcan to sweep himself a hasty clear path through the enemy ranks. He did dodge through most of the enemy return fire, though his craft took a pair of hits on the way through.

"Fox-two!" Shin says again as the third pair of his Phoenix leaps off the rails of his craft, each missile tracking in its own direction on another of the two-dozen or so helicopters that were still in the air and trying to get in a good position to shoot them down. Of course, it was not working properly since most of their shots could be dodged if seen. He proceeded to do as Greg did thereafter, using his guns to mow a path through the enemy ranks so as to put them between the incoming missiles and their fighters. Mickey simply ducked under their formation to avoid the fire that Shin dodged and Greg mostly dodged.

The missiles were not overlong in arriving at the helicopters, of which three took the bait and blew a total of five helicopters apart spectacularly. The fourth missile blitzed through the helicopters, its computer convinced that a fuel storage tank was a valid target. The missile homed in on the tank and crashed through the outer wall, detonating inside the tank with its massive warhead. The shockwave of the detonation completely shredded the tank asunder, and that moments before the hot steel fragments began igniting the aviation gasoline vapors.

"Holy bajeebus!" Greg says, his plane the closest to the enemy fuel bunkerage that had just cooked off. "That was some serious fireworks," he appends after a moment.

"Excellent," Shin says. He remembered the mission briefing said do not destroy the base, but in the case they failed he wanted to see as many of their assets in smoking heaps, just to make NATO's task that much easier.

"Let's get back on the tank, guys," Mickey notes as he rolls right, around the enemy helicopters to track in on the behemoth they were trying to destroy. "I'm almost out of bombs, though," he notes.

"I have most of mine, Greg?"

"Two Super Shells, four Thunder Lasers," Greg notes. "I'm goin' in," he says as he activates the last of his Super Shells.

"Mickey, distract that small SAM launcher, I'll drop my six bombs on it, and Greg can hit it with the Super Shells."

"Roger that," Mickey replies, less than thrilled about being the bait in a bait-and-switch operation.

Sure enough, the enemy missile launcher fired a smaller SAM at the onrushing planes, and Mickey immediately drew it aside and decoyed it with flares. That missile flew into a tree and blew the tree to splinters, harming no aircraft and only one raccoon in the wrong tree at the wrong time. Mickey pirouetted his aircraft back on target again, coming in behind Greg, and armed his bombs for the final drop.

"It is time!" Shin shouts as he triggers his BDC to release his bombs. All six dropped away clean and struck the tank from forward to rear, blowing six very large rents in the upper armor of the tank. Instinctively he dove back down to NOE flying to get clear of the tank, just in case Greg missed high he did not want to chance being in the flight path of one of those Super Shells. They were not pleasant weapons, he could tell.

"My turn!" Greg shouts as he triggers off the remaining two Super Shells. In less than a second the two shells struck the front glacis plate of the tank, and even through the impact smoke and dust he could see the gaping hole in its armor. "Mickey! Do it!" Greg shouts.

"Roger that!" he says as the enemy tank fires a third volley of the Stovepipe missiles, though they armed on the far side of Mickey's plane and never even saw him as a valid threat. Mickey dropped his last four bombs in a wave pattern that he was hoping would hit the front of the tank. A small fireball extolled the fact that he blew something on it apart, though the enemy machine lived through the last bombs. "Holy shit, how much abuse is thing going to take to kill?" Mickey asks.

"Tally armaments," Shin orders.

"200 rounds of Vulcan, two Cluster munitions," Mickey replies immediately.

"No Vulcans, four charges of Thunder Laser," Greg replies.

"And I have two Phoenix missiles and 400 rounds of Vulcan. This is not looking good."

"I have an idea, actually," Greg says. "I'm going to take a shot at its ass right now, hold off those helos," he orders. The enemy helicopter formation had basically gravitated to the tank and was now hovering over it.

"Can do," Mickey says as he approaches the enemy formation with his gun firing in really short bursts. As he passed just forward of them, he triggered one of his cluster munitions and hammered it to get away. Again the charge strips ejected from his plane, and the explosive balls damaged more than half the helicopters or destroyed them, as well as causing more armor damage to the rear of the enemy missile tank.

"Fox-two!" Shin says as he triggers the last of his missiles. The two missiles guided true, and one of the downed helicopters even had the honor of falling on top of the enemy missile tank.

"Try this on for size," Greg says as he positions the Thunder Lasers over the target. His craft took one hit, two hits from the two remaining helicopters, but he had to be close enough to the enemy tank to... "There!"

The Thunder Lasers were not external pods, per se, they were actually mounted into the frame of his craft below the radar nacelle in the front of the craft. When he triggered them, the two Thunder Laser pods each emitted three beams: one upwards at a 30-degree angle, one downward and left at the same angle, one downward and right at the same angle. In each case, the upper beam streaked into the missile pack and damaged the launching mechanism, the left beam struck the tread on that side of the tank and severed it clean, forcing the tank to a stop. At the least, NATO could finish it off with a coordinated artillery barrage of their own.

The lower-right of the lasers were the clincher. One of Mickey's bombs had blown a crater clear into the innards of the tank, and here a design flaw would cost it big time. The tank itself had a large capacity of internal sorage, so the tank could operate its missile launcher autonomously and reload on the move. Hell, the way the tank was planned on paper, it could operate completely without support for days on end and defend itself against ground and air threats. Except, it lacked a blowout system for its missile reloads stored internally, and when the laser entered it ignited the engine on one of the ground-penetrating missiles. That engine, unable to go anywhere but forward, drove forward against the reload bulkhead until the missile's fuse triggered. The pressure against the fuse detonated the radial explosive charge in the missile, which began a cascade of detonations in the rest of the missiles.

The explosive force converted the missile rack on top of the tank into something resembling a flying quonset hut, as it did three lazy rotations in the sky before it began falling back down to the ground. The rest of the tank was shredded top and bottom; immediately its petrol bunker converted a hundred meters in every direction of the tank into a lake of fire as the frame of the tank itself burned. There was no mistaking this one, the enemy tank was a goner.

"Hell yes, Greg!" Mickey shouts as he breaks off from the Regulator. "That kicked major portions of ass!"

"Excellent shooting, Greg," Shin adds to the conversation.

"This is just the beginning..." Greg replies as he joins up with his comrades in heading north and upwards to Angels 19 to get clear of the battle area.

-x-x-x-

'Hail' Mary did not relish what he had to do, but it was inevitable. Better he inform General Barkas than anyone else. He picked the phone up and dailed the General's extension.

"Barkas," the General replies gruffly.

"Chazz here, we have a situation at the frontline base."

There was silence on the line for five seconds. "Understood. Is there anything left?"

"We have the plans for the model, but the prototype has been destroyed. They bombed and strafed it a half-dozen times, only destroying it apparently after they got inside and detonated the missile reloads."

The response was fast, in this case. "Disengage our ground forces and pull them back to Fortress One or the Ground Carrier. Evacuate the base. We will press forward in due time to reclaim it, so do not have important facilities destroyed. Status of the enemy air forces?" There was no operational reason to leave his frontlines exposed now that they had nothing to guard.

"Damaged heavily, not destroyed," Chazz replies. That was the great black mark on the loss of the Regulator, he was sure that the SAM systems it had would be ample to swat some flies...

"It will do. We'll go over what went wrong with the witnesses after they have cleared the base out. NATO wins this one, but I want it to be a pyrrhic victory. Get Spirit into position to bomb the hell out of their base. Support them with craft from Fortress One and the Ground Carrier. The least we can do is repay the debt incurred, no?"

"Aye, sir," Chazz replies. Barkas was not a screamer general like some that he had worked under before, but the lack of major complaint on his part was grossly unnerving to Chazz. "And the Regulator?"

"We will need to re-engineer its ammo compartment to blow out safe, if that is what killed it. Get to work on it, Colonel."

"Aye sir, Chazz out."

Author's Chapter Afterword:

The first mission of the game is really just a warm-up. Even still, mission one is a frenetic combination of ground and air action that I hope I managed to catch at least some of the mystique of it as the team assaulted the base and the tank.

I have done a lot of modding on certain aspects of the game for this story, to both increase the realism and the challenge for the three pilots, and of course to translate a 2-D side scrolling game into a 3-D work. Some things never change, however, and the wise-cracking pilots and powerful weapons are two of them. More is the better; they will need their senses of humor and even more effective guns as the missions progress, because the enemies are not going to get any easier as the matter continues.

Just wait until they get a hold on some Megacrush missiles :P

Next Up: The first of the Air battles as the Spirit group comes down from the enemy base to put some more crater in Area 88 real estate. There just is no value to land any more...

* * *

Review Replies:

Only one person reviewed chapter one, and I hope I am doing better than that. Thank you, **Knives91**, for the encouragement; I hope this sample is enough proof that I have no relent on this fic, just as much as I do on the others I write.

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The Gripe Sheet:

None on the list so far.

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Footnotes:

(1): Ack: Old Britsh term for Flak, field artillery used against aircraft.

(2): NOE: Nap Of (the) Earth, basically flying almost skimming the ground to confuse enemy radar and defensive measures.

(3): MLRS: Multiple Launch Rocket System, the US premier rocket artillery unit. About as fast overland as a tank and carries twelve 227mm rockets that have a lot of explosive power. The only downside is that each MLRS unit has only twelve missiles before it needs to reload.


	3. The Spirit In The Sky

(Chapter 3: The Spirit In The Sky)

"Jesus," Mickey swears as he paces the length of the runway that he had almost died on earlier in that day.

"Helluva wakeup call, isn't it?" Greg says as he starts walking toward the hole in the runway.

The tarmac itself was 200 meters wide, more than ample to land a fighter at, more than enough to land a cargo plane or even a passenger plane at. The hole that had been blasted in it was almost 35 meters wide, and right in the center of the runway. It had been patched over with a steel grate cut to fit hastily so it could be used for landing operations, but right now a patch was being poured in the runway by a cement truck and a dozen Army Corps of Engineers personnel from the British Army.

The team had won the first battle and more or less forced the enemy to abandon their forward fire base. NATO had been understandably cautious about moving forward, but the refinery-missile base combo facility had been left entirely intact less what damage the UN Squadron had caused. For the most part the base itself was in one piece, and the enemy MLRS had eventually stopped burning and smoldering so the intel weenies could examine it. They had initially apprised that the tank was engineered very large and for a hellish amount of abuse, more than three fighters would ever be expected to nominally deliver to it, but they had pulled a lucky shot and slammed its ammo bunker. The whole MLRS was ingenious from the ground up, lacking only the blueprints for NATO-allied installations to build a few of them. The one downside: the unit was very massive, and would be understandably hard to ship from place to place.

Area 88 paid for it in spades, though: where you looked, in every direction there was some form of damage to just about anything in the area. Personnel were lost, equipment damaged, even the fighters that were not on the base did not survive unscathed. On the other hand, the experimental weapons systems used by the team had proved the validity of the designs and proved they were incredibly powerful of their own right. The super shell itself was enough to punch through a couple normal-sized tanks the long way, which would change the nature of air warfare to have that much firepower in such a small package.

"How many?" Mickey asks as he approaches the hole himself.

"140 support personnel, 26 guards. Just about every building took damage except the hospital and the cafeteria."

"That's good, at least we'll get a decent meal before we go out again."

"The cooks were part of the casualties."

"Shit," Mickey notes. "The bar?"

"It's gone, but apparently it is high on the list of priorities to get rebuilt," Shin notes as he approaches the hole that was slowly filling up with concrete. "Two of the hangars are mostly intact, which should make repairing the craft much easier. Not that they will wait overlong before they try to flatten us again, and the next might be by air instead of long-range missiles," Shin notes gravely.

"How so?" Greg asks.

"Satellite intel shows the enemy has a modified B-2 Spirit on the runway right now, fueling and arming as we speak. If that thing gets airborne, we'll have to find it the hard way and try to shoot it down before it arrives here," Shin notes just as gravely as before.

"Or it will finish what the MLRS started, and in no small way," Mickey adds. "Does it have nuclear capability?" he asks, knowing that the American B-2 fleet could easily carry B-61 Gravity Bombs (two-stage nuclear bombs) that could turn several kilometers of real estate into a 'glass parking lot' as the crass euphemism went. This made the matter all the more dangerous, as the bomber in question really only needed one bomb to do the job right, two for guaranteed kill, three for overkill, and a fourth to finish off the cockroaches.

"It does not matter," Shin declares. "Two thousand pounds of high explosive or a four thousand pound nuclear bomb, any more damage to this base is going to put us completely out of action, and that spells a slow, painful death to NATO."

"I hear that," Greg says. "Can we preemptive strike the bombers while they are on the ground?"

"No," Shin replies immediately. "Their defenses are too heavy to accomplish that, we would not make it past the desert before their fighters and ground defenses annihilated us."

"Ah," Greg almost moans.

"We can intercept them in the air, the bomber itself should be thin-skinned and unarmed if I remember the B-2 stats from my days of piloting in the JSDF," Shin says. "All we need to do is get behind it and spray it down with our guns, and the enemy will be the ones picking up the pieces."

"Evil, pure evil," Greg notes. "I like it," he adds after a moment.

"How soon can we launch?" Mickey asks.

"We have to launch after they do, to intercept them over now-allied-held territory. Launch too soon and we'll be flying unfriendly skies," Shin notes, using a corruption of an old airline advertisement slogan to hammer home the point.

"Here's to hoping we do it right the first time, or there may not be an Area 88 to return to," Mickey replies dubiously.

-x-x-x-

"Attention!" one of the crew of Spirit shouts as the Colonel steps in. They remained at attention while the Colonel moved to the lectern.

"Please be seated," the Colonel notes. "By now you have all heard what happened to the Regulator. We lost the prototype but not the plans, so we're not completely screwed here. On the other hand, we need to make this UN Squadron bleed for their intransigence. We've given them a broken bones with artillery missiles from the Regulator, now we remove limbs and hopefully their head. You men shall be the sledgehammer that brings down their base and their chances of casting us away."

"Sounds fun, sir, where do I sign up?" the pilot of the Spirit replies.

"You just did, son," Colonel 'Hail' Mary replies. "Your mission, and this one is mandatory, is to conduct a bombing campaign against Area 88 with the primary objective of knocking out their remaining air support facilities. Additionally, should you encounter their air units in transit you are to intercept them using all available weps on the Spirit."

"Mission constraints, sir?" the navigator requests.

"Two: one, NATO targets may be big and fat and exposed, but Area 88 is your primary target. If you scratch the remainder of their airbase and have ordinance left over, feel free to dump on NATO, not before. Second, keep in mind that is it permissible but not preferred that you can eject if necessary. That being said, if you encounter this UN Squadron in mid-flight, you are permitted to get frisky with them. If you can knock them out of the sky, it will be much to our advantage."

"Allied forces?"

"You will be deploying with a full wing of Hornet, Flanker and Fulcrum fighters to clear the way through enemy airspace. They should be more than capable to the task of scratching this UN Squadron, but just in case they blow past your fighter cover you are authorized to take them out yourselves. Now, part of this operation will be over enemy territory, so expect blind-fire SAM and triple-A in the vicinity of your flight path. Just like their own stealth craft they cannot properly identify it with radar. We're going to try and sanitize the area before you overfly with Wild Weasels, but don't expect a miracle on their part. Also, be advised that we have a separate air operation that will be crossing your sky area, Backfire bombers headed to fat and juicy NATO targets. They are also modified for AIM roles as well, so they may be able to support you if it gets hairy."

"Roger that, sir," the pilot notes, since it would be in his hands to avoid such nuisances as AAA and SAMs and hopefully kill off these Area 88 pukes.

"Your depart time is 0200 hours. Good hunting, Spirit."

"Attention!" The crew comes to standing once again.

"Dismissed," the Colonel says. The four filed out immediately, leaving only the Colonel at the lectern. "Good luck, men," he says before he stacks his paperwork and heads toward his office near the rear of the massive Section 4 base.

"Colonel, in here," a certain authoritative voice orders as he passes a certain office.

"Sir," Colonel Mary replies as he stops at the door.

"Come in and grab a seat, we need to talk," General Barkas says. "Colonel Chazz Mary, this is Colonel Amelia Mazas, appropriations and resources section," the General introduces the other officer in the room.

"Ah, 'Hail' Mary in the flesh," she says, rather surprised that she would find him halfway to nowhere. "I guess I find it rather hard to understand why a hero of the homeland would be out here instead of mixing it up with the hated enemy, such as they are."

"Simple. We do our jobs here, the battle gets easier there," Colonel Mary replies matter-of-fact. He had not encountered this lady prior, and what he had seen of her so far was not all that bad looking...

The Colonel was not one to get his hopes up, but he thought he had been checked out by the Colonel from Appropriations. "Regardless," she continues fairly smoothly, "the designs for support units have thus far garnered the attention of the Home Office. It is the opinion of the NRC that the destruction of the prototype frame had been due to enemy luck and superweapons. Some refinement, use of better materials available to the production divisions, should alleviate the problems. It is also notable that the simplicity of production on even the larger designs should make the manufacture process a lot easier for our industries to absorb, which really only leaves tactical application and training standards," she concludes.

"I can send you the rough calcs of what it was capable of when it was working, can you use those to generate tactical standards? Or are you going to need another prototype?" Chazz asks.

"We will assemble a few of them off-site and do the testing necessary, but your data on the machine in practical use would also add to the standards," since it went without saying that testing was usually done at ideal conditions, and real-world data usually factored in less-than-ideal conditions. The distinction was a small one but could be critical in battle.

"Thank you, Colonel Mazas. If I may, I have some operational matters to discuss with Chazz before we wrap up for the day."

"A pleasure, General," the Colonel stands, salutes, receives a return, and was on her way in less than ten seconds. On the way out, Chazz could not help but notice the striking figure made all the more so by her dress uniform, though he quickly put such thoughts aside for another moment. Work was at hand, the kind of work he thrilled at.

"I take it Spirit is doing their preflight right now?"

"Yes, sir, they are readying to launch as we speak."

"Conventional munitions only, correct?"

"Aye. No sense invoking an ICBM strike on our base, that would cause nothing but trouble for us in the long run." Nothing was really said of such a strike being fatal to the base, because it would not be. Much like NORAD, the base was buried inside a mountain, and more to the point was buried under several mountains, making picking which mountain to nuke off the face of the planet a dicey proposition at best.

"Indeed. You think we can finish off the UN Squadron in this sortie?"

"I will be honestly surprised if we do not. They're already on the ropes, all we need to do is push them off the mat and its game over."

"NATO is becoming a pain in our arse. What's the status on Gungnir?"

"Still awaiting finalization of the weapons systems. After that, kiss NATO goodbye," he says. It went without saying that a weapon as was being constructed into the Gungnir platform would definitely match its namesake in pure destructive capability, which made things tactically simpler for Section 4 both here and at home.

"All right, get to it. I want them erased off the map, Chazz, and I want these projects to amount to something in the end."

"Aye, sir," Chazz says as he stands up.

"And one last thing, Colonel. I don't want to have to deal with the paperwork from any 'unprofessional conduct' or 'undue inter-service rivalry', clear?"

"I shall avoid such situations, sir," Chazz replies, knowing quite clearly what the General meant.

-x-x-x-

"I am beginning to dislike this Section Four," Mickey says sourly.

"Don't worry, the bartender sounds like he'll protect that shot of rum for you with his life," Shin notes as he finishes his preflight list. "Tower, this is Tigershark, reporting ready to launch."

"Tigershark, you are cleared for takeoff at this time. Good hunting, pilot," the Tower notes. It was almost a minute before anything else was said, then:

"Tower, Tomcat, requesting takeoff clearance," Greg requests as the Tigershark moves onto the runway and jams the throttle to the max.

"Tomcat, move out," the Tower orders. In moments he was up off the ground and ready to head out himself.

"Corsair, requesting permission for takeoff," Mickey asks finally, assured that the controls on his fighter were working properly.

"Corsair, wait 3-0 seconds before beginning taxi at this time, then you are cleared for takeoff."

Mickey counted off the thirty seconds under his breath, than began his taxi. With some minimal effort he was able to get his plane to the required spot and aligned to take off properly. Like the last mission, he was loaded heavy but did not have the ground attack 500-pound bombs, as there would be no target to drop those on up in the skies. He began by hammering his throttle forward to make sure the engine would not flame out; satisfied, he hauled back and began advancing his throttle in a gradual increase instead of hammering it.

"This is it, gentlemen," Shin notes. "We fail this mission, we would best punch out and surrender."

"He's right, no base to come back to means no joy for us," Greg says. "Still, I don't see us losing here, unless they got something up their sleeve we don't know about."

"Don't get cocky, Greg," Mickey cautions as his plane closes up on the formation. "If they outnumber us heavily, we got problems, big ones."

"Supposedly the enemy bomber is a B-2 Spirit, which means our radar systems will not be able to track it. We will have to go in visually with guns to take it down," Shin notes.

"Where the hell did they get one of those? America doesn't exactly sell stealth bombers to other nations," Greg asks rhetorically.

"Hey, nobody knows where these bum-holes came from to begin with, so guessing how they got their hands on American stealth bombers is about as pointless as asking where they came from," Mickey replies with a little more anger than usual. "Sorry 'bout that, frustrated," he offers as apology and explanation.

"Bah," Greg replies. "We're all frustrated. These punks just won't give up and go away."

"Contacts," Shin notes. "I'm getting increasing returns dead ahead, above us at this time, range 400 kilos."

"Won't be long before we get to tangle with them," Mickey notes. "How many?"

"Over thirty, count still rising," Shin notes, then stops to look out and about instead of counting the dots on his radar. "Good Lord, they're in the middle of that storm cell," he says after roughly calculating where they were. A storm cell of cloud cover was very well situated dead ahead of the three pilots, and that is where Shin was getting the radar traces. "These guys are insane, flying in something like that, one lightning strike and its all over for them," he adds.

"Well, if the enemy bomber is in there, that's where we have to go," Mickey declares, though his tone told that he did not exactly trust his own logic on the matter.

"Think they see us yet?" Greg asks.

"In that scuzz? Not a chance in hell. They won't even know we're there until after we've started shooting them down," Mickey replies.

"Follow me in," Shin says. "Make sure you keep track of the others and keep your speed constant. If we have to start maneuvering, we run the risk of ramming each other."

"Roger that," Greg replies.

"Going in now," the gap to the enemy fighters was now only 200 kilometers away, and closing at a decent rate. They would be closing a lot faster if they were headed straight in for Area 88, but Shin figured that the enemy was either navigationally challenged or planned on striking from somewhere north of the base. Either way, the team had a side-on attack profile to the storm cell, making things easier for him and not for the enemy.

"Almost there," Greg mutters as they started passing parts of the outer layers of clouds.

"This is wild!" Mickey half-shouts. "What the...are they controlling the clouds?"

"Can't be," Shin replies. "The clouds would not be able to keep up with the fighters," he says. "Almost on top of them, people, get ready for it!"

Shin's left hand reached down to the master arm switch and flipped it on, converting his fighter from a formation of flying parts to a serious weapons platform. Immediately his right hand moves the selector on his control stick to the Phoenix AAM, and his radar begins classifying threats by range and known type, of which only some of them were really known, the rest were new units. "Go Phoenix, thin the crowd?" Greg asks, since it would be his plane that also carried the Phoenix missiles, and in greater quantity than the Tigershark used by Shin.

"Launch when ready," Shin orders as he locks his eight Phoenix onto as many separate targets and verifies all eight locked up. "Fox Two!" he shouts as he triggers all eight of the missiles.

Greg did the same, triggering his ten Phoenix missiles to the shout of "Fox Two" and both pilots watched as the missiles ripple-fired from their craft and immediately streaked in on the enemy. One by one by one, the enemy fighters took the hits, blissfully unaware what was going on until after the first of the missiles hit and blew a fighter completely in half. After that, things got a bit hectic as the enemy began trying to maneuver, but not to great effect. Phoenix was designed to defeat squirrelly enemy fighters, and in close the missile's immense range only meant that it could easily chase down an enemy fighter for far longer than the pilot's nerves would hold out. The eighteen missiles launched accounted for as many fighters and one more, an unlucky sod that ingested part of a wing from a destroyed fighter nearby and blew his engines out with the debris sucked in.

"Take it up a couple thousand, people," Shin cautions, and the group advances up two thousand feet in the space of a handful of seconds. If anything, the enemy would look at the same flight level that their comrades had died, maybe a little higher, but not likely much higher.

"Guys, I'm getting active radar tone, someone's looking long and hard for us," Greg notes. "Take it up another 3K and try to come in behind them?"

"It may be the only way to survive this," Shin replies, since his systems were not receiving any threats. "Take her up at 100 a second, keep it smooth," he orders.

"Roger that," Mickey replies as they head deeper into the scuzzy cloud layers above them.

"Oh shit," Greg declares as the clouds thin to what appeared to be an enclosed zone inside the cloud formation—full of less-than-pleasant-looking craft. "Guys, we got Soviet Backfire bombers up here as well as some fighters," he says.

"Great, just freaking great," Mickey declares. "We have to take those Backfires out or the base is toast," he says.

"And those things have rear-facing cannons, which makes things dicey for us," Greg notes, having studied the Backfire as part of his NATO training in countering it.

"Enemy fighters coming in behind those bombers!" Greg says. "Radar sig shows they're Flankers!"

"Shit, these pukes are all up and down the Soviet model, how are we supposed to track them down?"

"We don't," Shin replies. "Go close on those Backfires, let's see what they've got in their crack-pipes," he orders as he switches over to his guns.

"Mickey here, I got some unrecognized delta-wings on my left, I'm going in after 'em."

"Make it fast, Mickey, we're dancing with a half-dozen Backfires up here and could use the help..." Greg notes.

"Right," Mickey grumps as he moves in on the now-panicking enemy fighters. As they passed below him, Mickey turned in on them with a split-S turn and dove down to where he was closing on them from dead behind as the two elements (pairs) danced back-and-forth trying to find who was shooting at them. Mickey did a quick 'check six' to make sure nobody was attempting to close up on his rear, then set his targeting system to guns. With a quick jink left, he centered his gun site on the rearmost of the left pair, then gave his Vulcan gun a half seconds squeeze. With that one half second burst, over a dozen 20 mm shells were loosed from his gun and lanced out to the enemy fighter now only 800 m ahead of him. With eight hits on the enemy fighter, the 20 mm slugs tore apart the left wing root of the targeted fighter, causing the whole left wing of the plane to shear off in less than a second. What remained of the plane lost control and nosed into the cloud cover below, never to be seen again by Mickey.

"Follow me in, Greg," Shin orders as Mickey was turning in on the enemy fighters. In what seemed to be the most possible suicidal move he could have made, Shin charged straight for the Backfire bombers. In so doing, Shin literally put the bombers between the escorting fighters and himself. With that done, he as well switched to his guns and gave the bombers a respectable lead for the direction they were moving being slightly different from the direction Greg and he was moving. In the same fashion as Mickey, Shin let loose a half second burst of 20 mm cannon at the optimal range, and for his efforts firing at a far larger target in the Backfires, Shin's fire struck the target without a single miss. Greg did the same, though his burst missed almost half the shots, though even with only five slugs striking the target he still brought the bomber down by way of destroying a fuel tank.

"No freaking way!" Mickey half shouts as he sees something he would much rather have not seen: how the enemy fighters were using glowing balls of energy as weapons. He managed to duck under two of the balls, the third clipped his vertical stabilizer but did not cause serious damage. "These fighters have those energy balls from before! Look for a dome on the upper surface of the plane," he cautions to the other two pilots as he maneuvers on the other fighter in the leftmost pair. Mickey got a fractional shot on the enemy fighter as both were maneuvering, though the two shots that struck the plane out of his half second burst struck the cockpit and eliminated the pilot.

"The tail guns on the Backfires are the same way," Greg says as he dodges around one ball, a second, a third, but fails to dodge the fourth from one of the Flankers. Thankfully, the ball in question struck the airframe just inside his left engine intake, damaging the paneling but not the all important engine. Reassured that his craft was not about to blow up or lose an engine, Greg slammed his throttle all the way forward to rocket between two of the remaining Backfires. When sufficiently far enough ahead of them, he switched weapon systems and triggered the cluster strips. Shin broke hard left as he realized what Greg was planning, and had the distinct pleasure of watching the cluster strips detonate immediately alongside the Backfires. The trauma from dozens of explosive charges detonating that close to the bombers brought each of them down in a flurry of flying aircraft parts headed in several directions at once. Shin knew this was going to happen, and his deft movement to the left away from the bombers kept him from becoming part of the debris.

"Good deploy, Gre—KUSO!" Shin shouts as he sees the most ungodly thing he ever expected to see coming from a Soviet bomber. The craft dropped loose two canisters that immediately deployed forward engines, instantly and very rapidly slowing their descent and forward momentum as moments later the cans swung out a set of six large metal legs, looking much like a suicidal spider designed to tear into an aircraft with pure impact. Shin dodged them easily—his fighter was more than capable of ducking under the slow-maneuvering suicide devices, but he came back up only to dodge another pair unsuccessfully—one tore the top five percent of his craft's tail. "Those—that is the most insane and inventive countermeasure I have ever seen!" Despite his stated admiration, he still had to take down the enemy craft and did so by way of a burst of gun from below—the bomb bay shredded apart, calving the main structural components of the craft that held the nose and tail together, and what was left of the craft folded in on itself before sinking below the clouds.

"I got ya suckers," Mickey declares crassly. Having dropped into a Split-S turn and come back almost directly at the Backfire Bombers that Shin and Greg were attacking, two MiG-style fighters were trying to track in on him as he moved to rejoin the main attack against the Backfire bombers, and he did not see them. "I still ain't seen that Spirit!"

"Damn, we have to find it before—Mickey! Two MiGs on your nine!" The warning was too late for him to evade, as the MiGs had already launched missiles just as Greg had said 'on'.

"SHI—EJECTING!" he shouts just before a trio of missiles broadsided his plane on the left side. Just like that, his craft was wiped from the skies, though the largest chunk of the fuselage continued forward and down to slam into the nose of the one remaining Backfire bomber, annihilating its cockpit and driving it below the scuzz. "Bombers down, now we do the last of the fighters, Greg."

"Fair warning, I'm running out of cannon shells," Greg acknowledges.

"May not matter," Shin says as he tries getting a MiG from the side as it crossed in front of him and missed by a matter of five meters astern. "I have track on the Spirit dead ahead of me. Moving in now!"

"They're getting confused by the clouds!" Greg half-shouts, astonished that he just saw one of the few remaining enemy fighters shoot up an ally of his with guns, leaving an impressive streak of fire headed toward the ground.

"Let's pull this off and get out of the clouds ASAP," Shin says coldly before running under the B-2 and performing a picture-perfect Immelman to come up behind it and at reduced speed.

"Comin' at ya!" Greg flew high over the Spirit, tripping his Cluster munitions at an opportune time; the Spirit flew into the cloud of exploding munitions, though much to their surprise the damage was minimal at best, barely peeling back the RAM in places and not damaging it in others.

"Going guns," Shin says before letting loose the cannon in his fighter. Several one-second bursts failed to cause significant damage to the enemy machine, even when the burst walked across the engine nacelles. "What the—no! I just sprayed this foe several times and it didn't flinch!"

"This is insane!" Greg half-shouts in reply.

"Oh, it gets better," Shin replies darkly. A pair of small hatches had opened up in the ventral surface of the craft, ejecting two large pods of some kind. "Dive!" he shouts, but it was a moment too late even for himself.

The two pods detonated behind the craft 300 yards, enough to ensure that the craft itself was not hit. One was below the flight level of the Tomcat and Tigershark, the other was right at it. The Tomcat took a couple fragments in the fuselage, nothing major because it was significantly farther away. The Tigershark, however, did not waltz away from the strike with mere peppering. In point of fact: "Oh man," Shin moans.

"You all right?"

"No, I'm losing hydraulic fluid in my starboard side and one of those fragments blew through my cockpit and embedded itself in my leg. I'm pulling out before I lose too much blood to fly. Damned shrapnel pods," he grouses.

"Understood, get low and fast, I'll finish this thing off," Greg replies. The Tigershark broke off, trailing vapor and a thin line of smoke as the Tomcat pushed forward to close up on the enemy. "My turn, punk," Greg informs the enemy beyond his windshield before snapping off a shot of Thunder Laser at it. Given that it was a small target, two of the beams missed low and one missed wide right, but three hits from the powerful energy weapon exceeded what the apparent layer of armor on the craft was specified to stop. All three punched into the craft, causing one of the engines to fail catastrophically and begin trailing black smoke.

The answer was another rude shock to Greg, but not an impossible one. As he crossed the centerline of the craft's rear, it discharged a burst of several different machine cannons, solid slug tracers streaking past him and tearing gouges out of his left wing, including knocking out one of the Thunder Laser generators. It was not enough to shear a wing off or bring his craft down, but a dozen alarms in his cockpit were now flashing red from the damage, lending credence to his irreverent thought that he could fly a brick with sufficient engines if it held together throughout the flight.

"Not bad, but I'm not through yet;" Greg rocks the selector switch up to the pylons for the Super Shell canisters, and jams his rudder back in the other direction to bring it back on target as the enemy pilot began a shallow dive down to clear the cloud layer. Greg forced his fighter down against failing aileron hydraulics, swept the wings forward to reduce speed and increase lift, and centered the radar sight on the rear of the now-electronically-visible enemy craft. It gave him a different aimpoint, which he lined up on and let loose the four Super Shells he carried.

The superheated plasma bolt left his craft at a very high velocity, dissipating part of its energy in the chase that inevitably led to the rear of the enemy craft. Designed with rudimentary resistance to ballistic and missile weapons (albeit more than the original United States B2 semi-stealth bomber), the Spirit was not protected against the blossoming energy weapons collection of the enemy. The Super Shells blitzed through the titanium shell on impact and dug deep into the main structure of the craft, gutting out parts of the engines without reserve. Immediately the craft's rear section began sputtering and flaming out of blown armor plates, though Greg made sure the detail was done with a second pair that entered higher and cut through the shrapnel canister launchers. The canisters below in the ready magazine were themselves cooked off inside the fuselage, with devastating results courtesy of the titanium armor.

With the second strike, the crew of Spirit was killed as their craft took a nose-dive toward the ground, flaming from several different locations on the fuselage as it began sinking ever faster below the cloud layer. "You guys chose the wrong team," Greg mutters to the just-disappearing stealth bomber before himself diving down through the clouds to perform a Split-S and head back to base. On the way down, he passed the still-decelerating Spirit, as it finally nose-dove toward the ground below.

"Area 88, this is Corsair, returning to base. Enemy bomber intercepted and confirmed going down."

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Author's Chapter Afterword:

Another chapter in the ballet of the skies. Been a while since I updated this one, but I've been mainly focusing on other works and this one is pretty much a wayside story for whenever I'm not up to writing in one of my epics. Sorry about that to anyone who is paying attention to it, but I have to divvy my time between a lot of different things.

Now, for all you military buffs who would rip me a new one for an armored plane, keep three things in mind: one, I know the B2 Spirit does not have armor, it is designed to hide, not take abuse. Two, these guys in Section Four are not normal terrorists or country invaders. Three, I have to make a logical real-world hash out of game mechanics, and armor is the only way I can think to make the Spirit capable of taking the kind of abuse it takes to kill it in the game. Shoot me later if you want to take offense to it.

As to the rest, well, lets just say the cloud cover played a helluva role in the battle. You can't kill what you can't see properly, right?

That's it for this chapter. Next up: As Section Four changes their plans pertaining to Area 88 and NATO, they deploy a naval asset to attack the base by cruise missile. Things are getting dicey on the ground and in the air...

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Review Replies:

Only one review, from **Knives91**, and I can only say that as this goes on, more and more wildlife may become casualty to the evolving battle. Stay tuned as the air war heats up...

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The Gripe Sheet:

Still no gripes from the readers. Come on, where's the complaints?

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Footnotes:


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